Browse Forums Building A New House 1 May 05, 2009 12:57 pm Hi everyone, I am new to this forum, I am just wondering whether designing your own plan through a bigger builder adds heaps of $$$$ onto the cost. I heard from friend of a friend of a friend (you know the way it goes ) that they had to pay $18,000 in architecture costs. Does this sound right? Re: Designing Own Plans 2May 05, 2009 1:13 pm I think it depends on what sort of home you are going to build, such as the size, location etc etc. We are building a duplex and we had quotes from 3k all the way to 30k. We chose the lower range of about 11k. DA approved Waiting on a few more Builder's quotes. Re: Designing Own Plans 3May 05, 2009 2:02 pm We've had a draftsman do up our plans, both for our duplex and now for our own home. We had a basic idea of what we wanted to begin with, and then they just made the plans better, and more workable IYKWIM. We paid about $3K for this I think. If you were getting a huge architecturally designed house you would expect to pay a lot, but for a 'normal' family home it seems a lot. Re: Designing Own Plans 6May 05, 2009 9:14 pm We are building our own design and our builder took the price of a similar size home from their portfolio and based the price on that using their standard specification. They told us that they price it by adding $500 per additional square metre and add extra if there are additional hips & valleys required on the roof and then priced any additional components like extra linen cupboards and any higher specification items we selected. We drafted our plans up using CAD software we downloaded from the net and then gave them to the builder for their drafters to use as the basis for their plans. They did not charge us anything additional for drafting costs. Our final price came in almost exactly as we had expected using the method above. My best advice is to shop around. We had 4 quotes based on the same design and specification level and the quotes varied by $100,000! We found the lower end and high volume builders were not too keen to do custom work but the mid-tier companies were pretty good. The key is to find a sales consultant who really knows what they are talking about (there are alot out there who don't!) Our custom build with Rossdale http://hazehome.blogspot.com/ https://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=17630 Re: Designing Own Plans 7May 05, 2009 9:35 pm I created my own design and got a drafty to draw up a full set of plans and working drawings for $800. You'll probably find that the smaller builders will generally be more comfortable (or adaptable) with taking on custom designed projects so are less likely to make you pay for the hassle. Hi All Just been working on refining the design. It has been a struggle getting everything to work, but I think we are 90% there. Again, don't buy a 32m deep block.… 16 5686 Yep, very good point. I’ll do more research and see what figures I get. Thank you! 8 2464 6 7972 |